artist's statement by lindsay harker

My role as artist in this project is a performative one: as researcher - following trails of visual data around the web; as ethnographer - interacting as a citizen in an online community; and as curator, selecting images to post that may relate directly or indirectly to the visual data that was collected in the Internet Group.

The main reason I have used Instagram as a medium is simply that it exists on the Internet, and I wanted to think of a new way of using it as a reference tool. Instagram, I realized, contains a readymade archive of self-reflexive visual information conveniently categorized with metadata in the form of hashtags. The square dimensions of most Instagram images also allowed me to easily share the netSquares very close to their original form, and I chose to use filters with discretion. Using a berrypicking technique as my search tool I started with #TheInternet as my primary hashtag, but also searched related terms such as #TheNet and #TheInterwebz among others. To broaden my results, I also searched for the same hashtags on tumblr, which has a similar aesthetic and user-base as Instagram.

I expected there to be some relation between the netSquares and the images that I found, and there were certainly some that resembled the structure of some of the drawings. One of the running themes in the netSquares was the dark side of the Internet, a place for "trolls" and other "monsters". Interestingly, I generally found the Instagram images to be more optimistic, and I would argue that this could be partly due to the fact that Instagram allows people to put their best filter forward, if you will, and their username denies them complete anonymity, whereas the netSquares were collected from people that had varying degrees of artistic talent under a time constraint, yet were anonymous, thus allowing them to explore their more honest and immediate responses.

Overall, the Instagram account itself mirrors one of the most common visual themes - that of a web. I plan to continue to maintain this web of images and to further interrogate these concepts to see how they change, or reinforce these themes over time.